I have wrestled with the lack of gratitude and trust I’ve witnessed in Christians during the pandemic. I decided to write a prayer to confess these lacks in myself and reorient my heart to these virtues under God.
Father:
We are grateful for science and for humans who understand the intricacies of your microscopic creation, as order and disorder are present where our eyes cannot see. We confess we are reliant on the wisdom of others.
We trust that scientists and doctors and government leaders are acting by their best but limited lights in their attempts to bring healing.
We do not trust in human wisdom and ingenuity but in your Son’s love for us in laying down the divine life he shares with you and the Spirit so that, by ourselves dying with the Son for the world you love, we might also have abundant life.
We are grateful for leaders in the past administration that developed a vaccine to defeat this pathogen that destroys your image bearers—our family, friends, and neighbors—in record time.
We trust the virologists and manufacturers of the vaccine intend to bring health and not harm to the human family, even as we admit this is only their best effort, their incomplete wisdom, guided where it is true by your hand, in the face of three million dead and many more disabled, slain by something they and we do not as yet fully comprehend.
We do not place our ultimate trust in their vaccines but we do trust your providence. We ask you to further enlighten us in our great need for you.
Make us participants in your healing energies. Grant us greater wisdom in our care for others and ourselves.
Where we are perplexed, bring clarity. Where we are divided, bring concord. Where we are certain, remind us that our vision is partial and opaque.
We do not place our ultimate trust in these vaccines; we trust in your Son’s body and blood which makes us participants in his divine life, a life that cannot be touched by death.
We are grateful for leaders in the present administration who have distributed these vaccines to our elderly and most vulnerable citizens with unprecedented speed.
We pray that those who are most susceptible to the virus continue to be our human priority, not only for our citizens but for the citizens of the world.
Let us not forget the privilege (or not?) of our wealth (for who knows what the right path is in the face of what we do not entirely understand?) that we might be as expeditious in loving the poor and the stranger and the prisoner as ourselves.
You are glorified in us and in our human efforts. You draw humans into your saving work.
We do not trust in our capacities and efficiencies and intelligence but in the divine weakness displayed for all in your Son’s saving cross, his vulnerability of self-surrender, on which all the energy and healing and beauty and goodness in the cosmos is founded.
Cause us to reject the arrogance that we know what is best in this moment for ourselves, our neighbors, and the nations.
Give us patience with those who, sharing our human limitations, see alternative paths to victory over this disease and the deprivations it has brought—directly by death and disability, and indirectly by our fumbling, imperfect responses to it.
We are grateful we were made to slow down and ponder in stillness what human life and community are for, and to be thankful for the simple things like face-to-face presence, holding hands, sharing food and wine, and embracing one another without fear.
We trust that you are restoring our connection with one another, our ability to be present to each other in suffering, death and burial, and in the ecstatic joy of birthdays, marriage feasts, and commencements.
We who are called by your Son’s name, by the name of Jesus Christ, have not always in this pandemic sounded like the people of thanksgiving, or the people of trust. Forgive us. We have lead the world in cynicism and ingratitude.
Help us to enter your Son’s gratitude for this good world, the thankfulness that was and is his as our human brother, walking with us our common path of suffering.
Help us to enter his unfailing trust in you, our Father, a conviction that you have all of us in our life and in our death by the Spirit and that death is not the end of anyone but resurrection.
Help us be ever mindful of those whose risky and tireless labor in laboratories, hospitals, warehouses, and stores, on farms, plants, and highways, and at sea and in the air, have served the living and the dead with their minds, hearts, backs, and hands. They are participants in your selfless love.
Help us amid our arguments, distractions, impatience, and scapegoating to see in this long, dark season the folly of weaponizing pathogens. May we realize these experiments as fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and repent, so we do not eventually eat our collective death.
Above all help us to hear your Son’s words, words spoken also by all the holy angels in the many appearances of heaven to earth: “Do not be afraid!” May your perfect love cast out fear, and rebuke those who peddle it for profit, manipulate it for control, and misapply it for “power.”
All of this we pray to you, Father, with your co-eternal Son, Jesus Christ, in the power of your all-holy Spirit. Amen.
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